The present invention relates to techniques that retain visual continuity when displaying related information.
An electronic document typically resides on a digital computer storage medium. The document may have information content, such as text, graphics, and tables, and formatting content that directs how the information content is perceived by a user. In general, the formatting content defines characteristics of lexical elements included in the information content.
Similar lexical elements share properties to maintain a consistent style throughout the electronic document. For example, first-level headings may be underlined and center justified, emphasized characters may be bold faced, and tables may be numbered automatically in a specified location.
Some document publishing systems, which include desktop publishing systems and word processing systems, allow users to define a style having a set of global properties and apply the style to a lexical element. Additionally, a document publishing system may allow a user to locally change a global property value for a particular element. These local changes to global properties will be called property overrides.
The FrameMaker.RTM. document publishing system, available from Adobe Systems in San Jose, Calif., (assignee of this patent application), displays local property values for selected text in a window on a computer display. Local property values result from global property values and property overrides. It is not always apparent to the user which displayed local property values are global property values and which are property overrides.
On some systems, to determine which, if any, local properties are property overrides, a user can locate global properties for comparison. Some systems may display the global properties used for comparison in a separate style window from the local property values. The local property window and the global property window may appear anywhere on the display, depending on where they were last placed by a user or where the document publishing system places them. For example, the windows may appear on opposite sides of the display from one another.
If a system cannot display a local property window and a global property window simultaneously, there may be a considerable delay in viewing the local property window and the global property window. The time taken by the user and the system to locate and display the properties impedes the possibility of displaying the local and global properties in rapid succession.
Another situation where a user compares two sets of data is when examining the textual content generated from template definitions. Rather than explicit words or symbols, templates use text and building blocks to specify formatting and information content. The formatting and information content is generated at run-time or when the system is requested to do so. Templates are useful for designing page layouts for tables of contents and indices, and for defining a consistent appearance for the content of headers and footers.
If the textual content generated is incorrect or undesirable, the user examines the template separately from the generated text to determine how to change the result. The presentation of the template may differ from the presentation of the generated text.